Getting Slimed : Anger Grows as High Water Table Leaves Neighborhood Awash in Algae, Cracking Sidewalks and Ruined Lawns

Insects breed in the street in a quiet western Simi Valley neighborhood, where heavy spring rains have shoved the underground water level close to the surface.

The sidewalks ooze with slime. The pavement decays. Fathers hustle their children away from the gutters with stern, sharp words, away from the clots of algae and sludgy water running there.

Mothers worry about a mysterious spate of flu and coughs and colds.

Roots rot in the constant damp, and their owners yank out beloved plum trees, orange trees, apple and pear.

Salt and alkali minerals percolate up through once-green lawns.

And the mood of residents in this otherwise pretty neighborhood is growing darker by the day.

High ground water has saturated this neighborhood after every rainy season for the past six or seven years, they say. But this year, they have had it.

Residents are passing petitions through their 1960s-vintage subdivision, going from tract house to tract house between Erringer Road and 1st Street, between Royal Avenue and Fitzgerald Road.

They are gathering information, consulting engineers, drawing maps and assembling photo albums.

And they are preparing to take their gripes first to a Neighborhood Council meeting on March 11, then to the City Council to demand some help.

“They know that there’s a problem, and they’re not doing anything about it,” says Don Lovato, who has complained to city employees because his Sutter Avenue home sits on soggy ground from the start of the rainy season into the dead of summer. “Their attitude is, ‘It’s not our responsibility, it’s yours. You take care of it.’ ”

Frances Lytle sighs, watching her step as she walks her dog. It wouldn’t do to slip and break one’s neck, she says.

“It just plain stinks, it smells like sewage,” she says, eyeing the brown water that stains her Wallace Street sidewalk and coats it with slime. “The sidewalk’s nasty, and they won’t do anything about it because it’s on private property.”

Assistant City Manager Laura Herron responds, “It’s somewhat of a complicated problem.” But the city has taken no official stance yet.

She acknowledges that the west-end horror could fall into the act-of-God category, where property owners--public and private--look after their own.

“I suppose there will be discussions about where the responsibility might lie,” Herron says. “I think, at the very least, the city can certainly act as a facilitator to try and identify, for the residents, various means of addressing the problem. And to the extent that we might be able to identify resources or assistance, we certainly would.”

But many homeowners want someone else to blame, someone who will pay, someone to make the problem go away.

“What are you gonna do? I figure we pay our taxes,” says Lytle’s husband, Jim, whose home has been waterlogged the last seven rainy seasons out of the 25 he has lived there.

He looks at the brown patch separating sidewalk from curb, lamenting the loss of once-tall trees now dead and gone, and sighs: “They’ve got to be able to do something about it.

Why now? Why not 15 years ago? he wonders. As do many.

City engineers hark back to the Leighton report, a 1985 study of the problem by Leighton and Associates Inc., geotechnical engineers, that was commissioned by the city.

Rainfall and mountain runoff pooled beneath the neighborhood in that wet season, flowing northwest through the Sutter Avenue area to the Arroyo Simi, the report says.

The problem is moving under deep, highly complex layers of earth--from block to block, year by year--making it difficult to pinpoint why water comes to the surface in certain places, in so many ways, the report says.

But the report does posit a reason that the water comes up in the first place:

Simi Valley was covered with agriculture--orange trees, lemon trees, nut trees and other crops--before the neighborhood was built.

Until 1962, farmers pumped water out of the ground to feed their plants from underground wells--hundreds of them.

Ground-water levels sank to more than 100 feet deep.

Then came the builders.

The orange trees came down. The houses went up. The pumping stopped. The rainfall increased. And the water oozed into the streets.

“The rapid rise of water in the west end is the result of decreased pumping and increased rainfall,” the Leighton report said. “The rise of ground water is bringing the water levels back to their natural state before man entered the valley.”

The report also suggested that 297 irrigation wells still exist. Only 66 were labeled abandoned in 1985, with no note of how they were left.

“The owner of the well is required by the County to reseal the abandoned well,” the report said. “When leaking wells are discovered, staff enforces the City and County well ordinance and notifies the owner to seal the well. There is a possibility that leaking sealed and abandoned wells or old non-sealed wells could be contributing to this problem.”

The city eventually sank a series of wells into west-end soil, designed to pump up to 1,600 gallons of water per minute from the ground and into the Arroyo Simi, the aorta of the city’s drainage system.

And the city continues to seal abandoned wells it discovers, according to a report by Public Works Director Ronald C. Coons.

This is cold comfort to Paul Crossman.

He bought his Caballero Street home last year, only to have water come shooting out of gaps in his driveway this winter, to watch it seeping up through his garage slab and soak the drywall 3 feet off the floor.

No one warned him as he house-shopped:

“The brokers have said, ‘Sue me, flat-out sue me,’ ” he says, barely containing his exasperation. “They know that the cost of suing them is more than we’ll ever receive from them . . . What can you do?”

Darren Carlton keeps draining his pool so he can patch it. Water keeps seeping back in.

“That water was just drained yesterday,” he says. Two feet of murk now hide the bottom, the water rising unstoppably toward the concrete cracks that he has patched and patched and patched again. Weeds thrive, choking the backyard at 2 feet high.

Carlton’s neighbors worry about their property values, about liability if someone slips in slime, about the dire prediction one engineer made for them: that the next big earthquake will liquefy the soil beneath their neighborhood and topple every house.

Jon Martin worries about 4-year-old Dustin, the youngest of his five children.

“I don’t like the fact that [city workers] come out here and spray DDT or something for the mosquitoes and the mosquito larvae,” he says. “How do you stop 4-year-olds from playing in the gutters? They won’t.”

Moments later, Dustin reaches through the opaque film in the gutter, wetting his hand.

“Dus!” Martin shouts.

“What?”

“Don’t play in the water.”